Page 112 of Demon Copperhead

I got up and moved on. Yes sir, it is. Hard to live, and hard to watch the opposite coming down the road at you.

I left out the f-bombs, not being sure if he was still with me or not.

I looked at the trail and the dirt and the moss.

The woods were their own show, with mushrooms for jokes.

Mushrooms like orange ears that looked like they’d glow in the dark.

I was delirious, given the no fuel in my tank, other than painkillers.

But I felt some things. The deer family that left their tracks in the muddy trail.

As much venison as I’d eaten in my life, I felt I was some percentage of deer.

I felt the kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world.

God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet.

Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks.

Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man.

Where you been. This is the fucking wonderful world of color.

After another hour I sat on a big old mossy log to catch my breath, and remembered the joint in my pocket, a going-away present from Maggot.

I hadn’t smoked much weed since Dori died, just not feeling it.

Hard to explain the various levels of doping hell, but there’s a dark territory past the pleasures that weed is made for.

I fished it out and admired it before lighting it up.

Maggot’s perfectly rolled white twig, pointed as a pencil on both ends.

I actually had a hankering to draw its portrait. Another itch I hadn’t felt in an age.

I set no land speed records. The sun got low, running me up against the wire on to-be-decided.

I wasn’t getting to the top of the cliffs.

Not this day. That original asshole, the body, took over then, harping on getting me through a night.

Not even asking, did I want to do that. Just the gripes, no water or food or roof over my head.

In dire need of a piss. The last was easily taken care of.

The rest was yet to kill me. I’d known sketchy shelter, and had logged enough hours hungry to be licensed as a professional.

Ain’t no hill for a climber, I thought, trudging up an ass-kick of switchbacks that knocked the wind out of me.

The trail wound above the trees to a gravel slope, and then the Sand Cave.

Dark and cool under a wide arch, seriously big.

You could set a single-wide in there. Evidence of previous escapades here and yonder littered the sandy floor.

If I were a Boy Scout, I’d have known how to make a campfire.

I’d have thought to bring a can of beans for dinner.

And a can opener. Water. Being an ignorant juvenile delinquent with little or no will to live, I had none of the above.

The person I felt watching me now was Angus.

Not like Mr. Peg, earlier, I knew she wasn’t really there.

But I told her to shut up, and she laughed some more.

That was it, the one place I’d like to be: talking to Angus.

Dopey, tougher than hide, generally if not always one to improve a situation.

Always saying I had to start trusting the ride at some point, because life was not a total and complete dumpster fire, which she was wrong about.

She said my messed-up childhood made me a better person, also wrong.

She’d believed I would go far, regardless my drawbacks galore and unsavory habits.

I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands.

Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon.

Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the mountainheads.

The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish.

Then poured off, easing them back into shadow.

I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater.

Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.

I shifted and felt the lighter in my hip pocket, and laughed at myself for forgetting it.

Stand back Boy Scouts, I told Angus. Oh my Lord.

I’d have paid money for a little bump of her.

Angus that was solid while all the shiny objects I craved came and went.

She was going away at the end of summer, to real college.

She’d gotten an offer she couldn’t refuse.

I was pissed as hornets. Vander-something the hell, Nashville T-N.

Who knew they could make country hits and brainiacs in the one convenient location.

Okay, my friend. I rifled around the mess inside me and found what I needed to wish her happiness.

Fly away and don’t fall back into the slime I’m trying to crawl out of here, and also drinking on the sly, calling it my life’s blood.

Too scared to leave the last place where people looked at me and saw their son or blood brother or their shot at a winning season.

I knew what she’d say about that. Trust the road.

Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.

I spent the night curled up on the sandy floor with my back pressed against cold rock, thirsty and hungry and in the end not sufficiently doped.

Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a copperhead, every squirrel rustling dry leaves was a bear.

If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly.